Pushed to the Edge: Part two Jump!

That Afternoon, we stood there in the woods near Lake Tahoe, looking down the inrun of a jump that was going to pitch each of us up into the air and then put us down 30 or 40 feet away on our skis or on our heads. I was pretty sure that Wild Bill O'Leary, a professional free-style skier and my coach, was going to land on his feet. He'd made a thousand jumps like this. In fact, he has a big color photo of himself in the upside-down part of a back layout off one of these jumps. You can't see where he took off from or where he's going to land, just his spread-eagled body hanging against the high-altitude blue sky, with the lake, the spectators' heads and everything else in the picture below him. If he had on one of those silver suits instead of the black ski outfit he wears, it could be a NASA photo. For him, the jump we were looking down on wasn't going to be much of a rush. But for me ... well ... for me, it was going to be a quantum leap, so to speak. I've skied since I was a kid, but this lip was three, maybe four times bigger than anything I'd ever ridden up and over. From the top of the run, I couldn't see the landing, because it dropped away too steeply on the other side. All I could see from where (continued on page 114)Jump!(continued from page 108) we stood was the lip and then a lot of space, so it was going to be a leap of faith, too.

It wasn't the 90-meter jump at Innsbruck, but it might as well have been. Every kid who ever sailed one of those monster jumps had to make this one on the way there, had to listen to his teacher and ignore the old instincts that live in secret body places, waiting for moments like this to burst out, shouting, "Get back!"

"The one thing you absolutely cannot do," Bill said, "you can't change your mind once you start down the track. If you try to pull out, you'll probably hurt yourself. You have to jump this thing harder than it can throw you."

Ah, yes, ain't it the truth? I thought. Life holds out special punishments for the hesitant, the too cautious. There's probably even a natural law that applies: No slack for the timid.... Yes ... but... isn't it also true that life keeps back nasty surprises for the stupid, the cocky and the overconfident? Couldn't a jump like this snap the big bone in your back if you didn't pay it proper respect, proper fear?

"And don't stand up there thinking about it too long, either," said Bill.

I'd already had a week to think about it. Bill and I skied together for four days while he watched me and talked to me and urged me always to do a little more than I would have tried by myself. He runs the World Free-Style Training Center at Heavenly Valley and when we met, I told him I was looking for whatever rushes I could get out of hot-dog skiing. Hot dog is not a phrase he likes. Free-style skiers have an image problem and professionals like Bill are sensitive about it. Serious, macho downhill skiers call free-stylers mindless yahoos, because they whoop and holler, or pussies, because they ski to music and use short skis.

Free-style skiing is a relatively new sport. It wasn't until the last half of the Sixties that equipment design became sophisticated and experimental, and short skis (50 or 60 centimeters shorter than the old style), with their tails turned up and their edges specially filed, all of a sudden made a lot of things possible that probably would have broken your back if you'd tried them five years earlier.

There are three events in free-style competition. The ballet is just that--dancing down a hill on skis. They do a carefully choreographed series of spins and dips and crossovers and they are judged on continuity, difficulty and choreography with the music--pretty much the same way you'd judge a ballet dancer. The mogul event--"skiing the bumps," they call it--is a wild, brutal run down a very steep hill full of hard, high, treacherous moguls. On a good bump run, you are in the air as much as you are on the snow, and you need the reflexes of a young cat and the leg muscles of a mature pig to really get it right. The aerial events are the heart stoppers, though. They're done off jumps designed to get you high enough above the snow to do a flip, or a double flip, or any one of a dozen other mid-air stunts that used to be done mostly off diving boards or on trampolines.

I told Bill that I wanted to try a little of all three but that what I'd really come for was to jump. I said that I'd done a little diving and a little work on the trampoline and that I was fairly comfortable in the air, but not too high in the air. Then I asked him if he could coach me up to a serious jump in a week. He said it might be a problem, and then I found out another reason hot-dog skiers are defensive nowadays.

"We had insurance," he said, "but when it ran out, the new premium they gave us was out of sight, impossible. So we really can't teach any inverted aerials right now. As it is, we can't even do straight jumps, not on Heavenly Valley property, anyway. It's a real problem. The sport could the if we can't teach these tricks anymore."

Insurance is the natural enemy of all adventure, I thought to myself. There's an army of pallid little men out there with slide rules where their brains ought to be and they've been trying for years now to force me and everyone else to live our lives by their calculations, trying to convince us that yesterday's worst statistic is today's grim probability. By the time the actuaries are through figuring out your premiums, it's a sucker bet, anyway. And worse than that is the timid worm it plants in your head.

"We might be able to find some kind of jump out in the woods, though," Bill said. "If it snows later in the week, we'll look for one."

It made me happy to think that there were still woods out there deep enough that the insurance peddlers hadn't penetrated.

Bill and I spent the first couple of days working on ballet tricks on a bunny hill near the lodge. He fitted me into boots and 150-centimeter skis and gave me a pair of poles without straps, so that when I fell, I wouldn't skewer myself. And I did fall. The first trick I learned is called a 360 and it's a simple, full-circle, running turn. And although there are only four edges on a pair of skis, I found 16 ways to catch them in the middle of a spin. About four of those ways can tear you in half like a wishbone and the other dozen put you on your ass or your face, and since there isn't much speed to these moves, you always land like a sack of wheat on a warehouse floor. Bill kept telling me not to look at my skis in the middle of the trick. "Your body always follows your head ... if you look down, you'll fall down. It puts you in the wrong place over your skis."

I knew he was right, but it's very hard to do strange new things without looking. Bill had told me before how important it was to keep your body weight over the balance point. "The forward position on the skis," he said, "the perfect place, is directly over the ball of your foot, with the pressure of your hoot tongue on your ankle. You can't hold it, but you should always be tending toward it." (Like enlightenment, I thought.)

Bill doesn't fall much at all. When he's on it, he can do standing flips and rolls and long series of crossovers and one-legged things with the freedom and grace of an ice skater. He's 32 years old, about 5'6", and he wears a trimmed beard below his black mustache. Eight years ago, he discovered free-style skiing and two years after that, he quit his job as a truck mechanic in San Jose and flew East to enter his first national competition. The weather and snow conditions were Eastern icy and there were 197 other entrants. He says he remembers standing a long time on top, looking down, before his first jump.

"I'll tell you the rush," he said. "The rush is when you first turn your skis down the hill and set them in the track. It's the instant you know you're really going to do it--that's the moment."

In that first competition, Bill took second in the ballet and sixth in the aerials and since then, he's made his living as a free-style skier. Over the past couple of years, he's given up competition to teach. Beconta, the ski-equipment manufacturer, sponsors his school and in the summer he runs a series of hot-dog camps for kids. He uses a motorized ski deck and for a while he even set up a jump on the edge of the lake that let you practice aerials, on skis, in a bathing suit, into the cold green water. In the winter, he travels around (continued on page 210)Jump!(continued from page 114) the country in a camper full of equipment, from ski show to ski show, doing his stunts.

By the third day, I'd learned to do a smooth 360 and a couple of other simple tricks as well. It was a good feeling, a very gentle kind of rush to come spinning down the hill like a dust devil. When you get it right, there's nothing to it. You skinny into that invisible narrows where weight and speed and balance are all one phenomenon. Gravity does it for you. But if your mind wanders, or your head drops, or if you're lazy with your arms, the fine tune goes off the move and gravity undoes it for you. It's physics, when you get down to it, though lately, books and magazines have begun calling it the Zen of sports. By now, they've invented a hundred vaguely Oriental ways to keep your Western mind out of the way of your body, which has a natural genius for physics. But no matter what you do, the mind is never completely out of it, and it's probably a good thing. Finally, it seems to be a question of whether the intellect is listening or talking. If it's listening, to the soles of your feet, to the backs of your legs, to the muscles in your ass, to the rhythm of your pounding heart, you're probably all right. If it's talking, jabbering at the body like an old woman, you're probably in trouble.

Later that afternoon, under skies that were clouding up nicely, we found a mogul, about two feet high, not much but enough for Bill to talk me through the first principles of jumping. When he talked about the mind--body connection, he put it this way: "Your mind won't let your body get hurt." There's something to that, I'm sure, but as much as I thought about it, I couldn't make it come out clean. Because no matter how much you concentrate or relax, no matter how much you listen to your body, if you run over a rock on your way into the air, it's pure physics again and gravity recognizes only things like speed, and weight, and center of mass, things that the mind can do little about once the body has left the ground.

"You have to get control on the lip," Bill told me. "Everything starts there and you have to take control at that point or you won't have any control. Lean forward, bend your knees, and when you hit the lip drive with your legs, bring your hands up and keep them in front of you. Once you're in the air, look for your landing."

We jumped the little mogul several times that day, but there wasn't much air to it, even if you hit it just right. It did let me go over the crucial steps in my mind, though, and it made me want to try something bigger.

That night, it snowed six inches. In the morning, we warmed up with some ballet, then we skied the bumps for a while to see how well our teeth were glued in. And about two in the afternoon, Bill told me that Tom Harmon, another of his instructors, had found a jump for us in the woods.

"It's a pretty good one," Tom told me. "You'll get about ten feet in the air, 30 or 40 feet of distance out of it. It ought to be a rush for you." He smiled.

Then Bill asked me if I was ready. My first reaction was, "I've been skiing all day, I'm tired, and now you want me to jump?" I heard the words coming out and they surprised me. I'd been waiting all week, cursing the drought and all insurance men, and now that everything was ready, all I could find inside myself was hem and haw.

We drove as far as we could on a snowy road into the forest near the south end of the lake. Then, with skis and shovels on our shoulders, we walked the last few hundred yards, up over a small hill, and then there it was. It hadn't been used in a long time and it lay under six inches of new snow, but the basic shape was there. I took one look at it from where I was and decided it was too big. It was going to look a lot bigger from the top of the inrun, but even from below, the proportions of the thing looked dangerous. The lip itself was six feet high and had the shape of an ocean wave just before it begins to break. From where I stood down on the steep landing area, the top edge of the lip was ten feet over my head.

I didn't say much as we packed and shaped the inrun, the lip and then the outrun. Bill had brought a small tape recorder and he set it on the snow near the lip with a disco-boogie tape playing. The music was distorted and absurd out there in the quiet and the afternoon sun and I thought about asking him to turn it off. But I was very busy trying to decide whether or not I was really going to jump or maybe find a lucky way out of it. I didn't want Bill or Tom to know that I was on the ragged edge of maybe, and if I started in on their music, it was going to be obvious. So I said nothing.

When the entire jump was packed and shaped, Bill side-stepped to the top of the inrun. He told me that the first time you go on any given day is a little scary, no matter how many times you've done it before, and as he stood looking down from the top, I thought I saw some of that in his face.

"All right," he yelled.

"Go for it," Tom yelled back at him.

He whooped and turned his skis down the track. He dug with his poles, trying to get as much speed as he could, and just before he hit the lip, his left pole caught in the snow for a split second and pulled his arm behind him. He exploded off the lip and into the air, his skis came apart and his arms cranked and flailed while he tried to recover whatever balance he could. Amazingly, he had most of it back when he hit the snow 30 feet later. He landed skis first, but his weight was way over backward. His ass bounced once on the snow, but he used his legs to pull himself upright again, and then he skied it out.

It was a rusty jump and he and Tom talked about it. Then Bill told me what he'd done wrong and said he wished the inrun were a little longer and steeper. Then he said, "Come on."

By the time we'd climbed to the top of the inrun, I was out of breath. As I stood there, gasping, Bill reminded me one by one of the things I was going to do. Then he said, "I'm going again," and he did. I watched from above as he got his speed, drove his legs into the lip and flew--higher this time, and farther, in perfect shape all the way. In mid-air, he twisted his skis to the left, then to the right. I couldn't see him land, but it must have been a good one.

Tom had hiked up to where I was, and from somewhere a group of four local high school students had arrived and were standing on their own skis next to the lip, asking if they could jump. They had the tall, healthy, cocky look of mountain kids. Bill pointed up at me and said, "This is his first time," and the kids looked up as if they remembered their own yes-or-no moment in woods like these. Then they stood back from the lip to watch.

"Do you want to go first or shall I?" Tom asked me.

"I don't care who goes first," I told him, still breathing hard and a little angry, the way I get with everything that scares me. "But I'm going to need a minute up here to get myself on this thing."

"I'll go," Tom said, and then without another word except a shout, he took off toward the jump. He hit it fast and well and while he was in the air, he jerked the tails of his skis up till they almost touched his wing bones in a maneuver called a back-scratcher. The kids at the lip cheered and howled. Then everybody looked up the steep track at me.

I was still taking deep breaths and I was talking to myself. My heart was pounding as if it wanted out and I tried to tell myself that it was normal and good and that no matter how long I stood there trying to slow it down, I wasn't going to. Loud, bad music was still coming from the snow around the lip. Bill had said not to wait too long. I knew he was right about that and when I turned my body down the hill and felt my skis start to run, I knew he'd been right about the rush, too. That was it. Adrenaline went through me, and all my thoughts, all my fears were suspended in it. I heard no music, no wind in my ears, no shouts, nothing. I was going pretty good as I rode up the lip and when I felt the snow run out from under my skis, I jumped with my whole body. And then ... I had that feeling that you can get only with serious gravity games, the feeling of leaving the planet in a very small craft, a thrill, a fear so visceral that nothing else exists while it's working. I was out of the air as quickly as I'd gone into it and the feeling when my skis hit the snow was maybe the most intense release I've ever felt. I'd let my hands get behind me in the air, so I bounced on my ass, too, but after I felt myself on the snow skis first, nothing mattered or could have scared me. I was up in one hop and in control by the time I skied to a hard stop on the last few feet of the outrun. I heard yelling and when I looked up, everyone around the lip was all smiles and thumbs up. I just stood there feeling fine that I'd blown my tubes clean with adrenaline and scattered all the demons who play in my head on ordinary days. There are some feelings like it in the world, but not many, and they are all sexual.

I jumped two more times that afternoon and the second was better than the first and the third better than the second for style and distance and height. The rush, however, got smaller with each jump, but that didn't surprise me. You have to up the ante, increase the dose of fear, add a new unknown, go higher or deeper or longer to get the taste of your own most powerful juices back. Ah, life.

"By the time the actuaries are through figuring out your premiums, it's a sucker bet, anyway."

"If the intellect is talking, jabbering at the body like an old woman, you're probably in trouble."